By Shaun Casey

AFTER a long 20 year wait, Carey Faughs are once again top dogs at Ulster Intermediate level, but now it’s all about the next step and Eddie McCloskey says his side are “chomping at the bit” to get stuck into the All-Ireland series.

Back in 2004, they lost out to East London club Robert Emmetts at the quarter-final stage and this time around they’ve already gone one step further, gaining automatic qualification into the last four of the competition.

Watergrasshill of Cork stand in their way of a first ever final appearance, and McCloskey insists the excitement has engulfed the club,

“It’s a massive challenge for us now to go and play Watergrasshill,” said the former Antrim hurler.

“The boys are chomping at the bit, and we’re just delighted to be in this position.

“We gave the boys Monday and Tuesday off (after the Ulster final) and we trained on the Wednesday night. It’s been good, there’s
definitely a good buzz about training.

“That’s probably been our mantra since January. We want the boys to enjoy training and playing for the club, we want boys to enjoy their hurling.

“I suppose from a management point of view, we want to keep boys motivated and in that frame of mind throughout the year. It’s worked out for us, it doesn’t work out all the time, but we know that boys are buzzing, we are where we want to be.”

While McCloskey may not have much first-hand knowledge of their Munster opponents, the ex-Loughgiel star, who won an All-Ireland club with the Antrim side back in 2012, is determined to find out as much as he can.

“Ireland’s not that big at the end of the day, everybody knows somebody, and you can always find somebody to get information on a team,” McCloskey added. “We have got a lot of information on them, and a lot of useful information more importantly.

“I’m sure they’ve got the same on us, so we’ve just got to prepare for Watergrasshill the same way we have done for every team we play this year. We do your homework, let the boys learn themselves and we just prepare properly.”

Carey Faughs came through a bruising encounter with Swatragh in the Ulster Intermediate decider, which they won by the minimum of margins in the end, and despite the intensity of that outing, McCloskey still has a full hand to pick from.

“We have a clean bit of health at the minute, and we’ve been really lucky this year. We’re not blessed with a massive squad, we have 25 players, we had 24 boys on the panel the last day that will be able to be used and that’s it.

“There’s nobody else after that so we need to be making sure our boys are at it, and luckily, we got through the Swatragh game with no injuries.

“Yes, they were sore, and they needed a wee bit of recovery, but thankfully, they all trained on the Wednesday night, fully fit.”